Diana: In Pursuit of Love (33 page)

As part of her renewed focus on humanitarian work Diana, using Martin Bashir as a ghostwriter, planned a charity book, provisionally titled
In Faith and Hope
, to point up her renewed commitment to global causes. Everything had been planned in outline right down to the launch party at Claridge’s, although, typically, Diana was worried as to whether she had the intellectual ability to write a book – even with a co-author. The literary agent Vivienne Schuster recalled the discussions about the projected book: ‘Under the terms of her divorce settlement she couldn’t – wouldn’t – talk about her marriage and divorce and the boys. But she did want to talk about the way ahead, and how she saw the future.’

An integral part of that future was her landmines work, the Princess having decided to throw herself into the issue. During the summer of 1997, she made two speeches on the subject, one in London, the other in Washington following an earlier meeting with Hillary Clinton. She had pencilled in a visit to Cambodia (‘She was terrifically excited,’ David Puttnam recollected) as well as trips to Iraq, Afghanistan, India and China. Diana was due, too, to make a speech in Oslo, Norway in September 1997, a week after her tragic death, in which she would propose bold new moves to render harmless minefields around the world, but her usual approach was to the people, not political.

Diana’s visit to Angola in January 1997 made a profound and enduring impression. ‘Those limbless children, I can’t get them out of my mind,’ she told friends when she arrived home, recalling how she had sat and held the hand of a little girl, Helena Ussova, whose insides had been blown out by a mine. ‘Is she an angel?’ the
youngster asked shortly before she died. During her visit to Sarajevo in August, Diana impulsively hugged a woman who was tending to her son’s grave in a local graveyard, a victim of the conflict, a young woman reaching out to another human being. ‘I pay a great deal of attention to people, and I remember them,’ she told the French newspaper
Le Monde
. ‘Every meeting, every visit is special.’

As Tony Blair had observed after their first secret meeting, Diana was one of those rare public figures – he included former American President Bill Clinton in that category – who could communicate effectively by a gesture. ‘Yes, I do touch,’ Diana declared in her last interview. ‘I believe that everyone needs that, whatever their age. When you put your hand on a friendly face, you make contact right away; you communicate warmth, show that you’re close by. It’s a gesture that comes to me naturally from the heart.’

Her favourite picture of herself showed her tightly holding a blind boy, who she knew was going to die, when she visited the Shaukat Khanum hospital in Lahore, Pakistan, in February 1996. Her trip was in response to an invitation from the former Pakistani cricket captain, Imran Khan, who had raised funds for the hospital. She was so taken with the hospital’s work that she flew over to Pakistan again in May 1997.

These visits were not, however, solely to support a deserving cause. Even after Diana’s BBC interview and the tumult over the divorce, the man who occupied her thoughts throughout this time was Hasnat Khan. He was, in her eyes, her salvation and her future, and Diana saw her visits to his homeland as much a chance to get to know his culture and family as to support Imran Khan’s project. She met Hasnat’s parents, and other members of his family, declaring on her return home, ‘They loved me, they really did love me and they didn’t mind at all that I’m not a Muslim. Now there is absolutely no reason why we can’t get married, I’m so happy.’

Diana was now talking about marriage, children, and a new life with Hasnat, either in Australia or South Africa. There was even a suggestion that she might consider converting to Islam in order to
facilitate their union. She formally introduced him to William and Harry at Kensington Palace, all the while harbouring dreams of becoming ‘Mrs Khan’ and, according to one report, of having a ‘beautiful brown baby girl’ she planned to call Allegra, a name suggested by Annabel Goldsmith. Diana naively believed that the baby girl, being of mixed race and with parents of different religious backgrounds, would help unite the world and aid in peace making.

The Princess certainly saw the relationship as a true partnership, believing that with Mr Khan by her side she could achieve her dream of opening hospices, modelled on Mother Teresa’s work, on a worldwide scale. ‘She felt that this could happen and that together, she and Hasnat could change the world. Diana was very serious as she was aware of her power by then and knew that the money would be there,’ asserted Oonagh Shanley-Toffolo.

At the same time, Diana actively pursued new avenues to help her lover advance his career abroad, either in South Africa or in Australia. She was so smitten with him that she accepted an invitation to attend a ball in October 1996 in support of the Victor Chang Institute in Sydney, named after a surgeon who had trained Hasnat Khan. A few days before, at a humanitarian conference in Rimini, Italy, she charmed the South African heart transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard and discussed the work prospects for Khan in South Africa. ‘She was just using me to get her boyfriend a job,’ complained the veteran surgeon. Several months later, in March 1997, she paid her first visit to Cape Town to get a taste of the country for herself, meeting South Africa’s President Nelson Mandela and enjoying a reunion with her brother Charles who, despite their previous differences, became her closest family ally during her last year.

While the prospect of making a new life existed as a tantalizing if unobtainable vision, Diana’s single-minded focus on the object of her love was unnerving. Intense and obsessive, Diana’s neediness was as demanding as it was compulsive. A certain ‘Dr Armani’ would bombard Khan with telephone calls while her butler was regularly sent to the hospital with letters and told to deliver them to the surgeon in person. Her demands began to interfere with Khan’s work, and on several occasions she became
distressed and tearful because he couldn’t come to the phone as he was in the operating theatre. As Simone Simmons observed: ‘She was besotted with him and I think his rather reserved manner made it worse.’

Khan’s work meshed with her own interests and it was not uncommon for the Princess to follow him on his rounds while he was on duty at the hospital late at night. She even watched him perform heart operations. Unfortunately her chance presence at one operation exposed her to ridicule and mockery. The Princess, wearing gown and mask as well as black mascara and earrings, was captured by Sky TV watching a heart operation which, it so happened, they had arranged to film. She spent four hours watching Khan’s boss, the leading heart surgeon Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub, operate on a young African boy, seven-year-old Arnaud Wambo, who had been flown to Harefield Hospital in April 1996 by the Chain of Hope charity, which had invited Diana to attend.

Afterwards she was not only criticized for being present in the operating theatre but, the
Panorama
interview still fresh in the public mind, she was also accused of staging a photo call to enhance her caring image. Sir Magdi Yacoub’s valiant defence of her presence – ‘The Princess comes to see sick people at other times, she supports them, she talks to them.’ – was lost in the cacophony of censure. Condemnation from the media, and especially a cruel parody by the satirist and impersonator Rory Bremner, deeply distressed Diana who felt what she saw as her ‘work’, that was so much at the heart of her true spirit, was being wilfully misunderstood, that the wrong motives were being ascribed to her.

While Hasnat Khan did his best to comfort her, he recognized this as a vivid example of what lay in store for him should they ever marry. His first real taste of media scrutiny was when the
Sunday Mirror
broke the story of their romance in November 1996. Diana promptly used her journalist friend Richard Kay to denounce the tale as ‘bullshit’ and state that the notion was ‘laughable’, but Khan felt that her denial rather debased him and their relationship. She was, after all, now divorced and entitled to admit to an adult relationship with a new man. That their romance continued in hiding diminished and demeaned them both. At the same time, however,
as Debbie Frank recollected: ‘He wasn’t at all interested in being a celebrity and would get very annoyed if things came out in the press about them – and he would accuse Diana of leaking it.’ Diffident and unassuming, the surgeon would rather be sipping a pint of Guinness in the Anglesea Arms public house near his apartment than appearing on the front pages as Diana’s latest escort. He wanted to follow in the footsteps of his mentor, Sir Magdi Yacoub, and become a medical professor. The limelight was not for him.

‘Everyone knew she wanted to marry him,’ Hasnat’s mother Nahid told the Pakistan
Daily Times
, ‘but he felt that a marriage would be impossible. “If we marry,” he said, “we will not be able to go anywhere together. The two cultures are so different.”’ Given the success of the marriage between Imran and Jemima Khan this argument was somewhat disingenuous, masking more fundamental difficulties that separated them. For it was becoming increasingly obvious that he felt constrained not only by the curse of celebrity, by the conflicting demands of Diana and his career, and by the cultural and religious divide between them, but also perhaps by his own fear of commitment. Hasnat Khan, two years older than Diana, had already been engaged twice before, to distant cousins, but each time he had called off the nuptials.

With a weary inevitability, the couple drifted apart, friends dating the end of their two-year affair between May and July 1997. While there was undoubtedly a large room in her heart set aside for the reserved Mr Khan, the Princess was moving on. Now independently wealthy, she was determined to be in hiding no longer; during the early summer of 1997 she enjoyed lunch dates with Christopher Whalley and went dancing with Gulu Lalvani. At a gala dinner at the Tate Gallery, which coincided with her thirty-sixth birthday, she was, according to her brother, on ‘sparkling form’, still glowing from the triumphant sale of her royal dresses in New York. In a pointed reference to the life she felt she had left behind, she wore jewellery given to her by the Queen and Prince Charles.

In the last five years Diana had travelled far, faced many demons and slain numerous dragons. When she heard that Prince Charles was hosting a fiftieth birthday party at Highgrove for Camilla
Parker Bowles, she might have merely gritted her teeth, but she made light of it instead: ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if I popped out of the birthday cake?’ It had not been an easy journey, nor was it over. But Diana was a victim no more – she was a strong, independent woman displaying a robust confidence as she tried to make sense of her mission in life. Her desire for a new man, and one day a new family, did not dominate her thinking. As she had said in her
Panorama
interview: ‘You know, people think that at the end of the day a man is the only answer. Actually, a fulfilling job is better for me.’

The Princess’s diary for the summer of 1997 perfectly captured the spirit of freedom, pleasure and commitment of her new life. As well as her landmine trips to Bosnia, Cambodia and Vietnam, and her speech in Oslo, Diana planned to enjoy a little retail therapy and culture with her American friend, the business executive Lana Marks, in Milan in late August. Before that she had another girlie week to look forward to, a few days’ island-hopping in Greece with Rosa Monckton. As the lawyer Richard Greene, who was in contact with Diana frequently at this time, observed: ‘It was a great period of discovery and exploration for her. Diana was enjoying life, playing and wandering with more impunity. There was the sense of a kid in a candy store about her.’

Before that, in mid-July, her heart still fragile after the end of her relationship with Hasnat Khan, Diana was looking forward to a week’s holiday with the two young men who had never let her down and whom she loved unconditionally, William and Harry. As they grew older it was, as every parent of teenage children knows, increasingly difficult to find destinations that would keep them amused.

Her one-time American boyfriend, billionaire Teddy Forstmann had solved her annual summer time dilemma for her, inviting her and the boys to choose between his mansion in the Hamptons or his home in Aspen, Colorado. The Princess picked the Hamptons and was looking forward to another stay in her home-from-home, the United States. As she would be travelling with the ‘heir and the spare’ she needed clearance from the security services before she could go. In what turned out to be a tragic twist of fate, the
security services – Forstmann’s friends are not sure whether it was the American or British side – vetoed Diana’s holiday plans. They had doubts either about the security surrounding the billionaire’s hideaways or perhaps a possible threat from elsewhere. Ironically, this decision by the security services, perhaps more than any of their perceived plotting in Paris, was what led to Diana being in Paris on 31 August.

While it was a blow for the Princess, for once she had a back-up plan, and she accepted a standing invitation to join Harrods owner Mohamed Fayed and his family at their beach-front St Tropez complex in the South of France in early July. It was safe, secure – and promised to be fun. In truth, with the landed gentry firmly on the side of the royal family, she did not have too many options concerning the people with whom she could safely and comfortably spend a holiday; this left her reliant on the largesse of rich outsiders in her own country or wealthy foreign friends and acquaintances. As the immediate heirs to the throne were involved, the Queen, Prince Charles and the Foreign Office were consulted. All gave their formal consent.

While Fayed cut a controversial figure, especially given his part in a bribery scandal involving Conservative Members of Parliament, as far as Diana was concerned he was first and foremost a family friend who had known her father and stepmother for years. He shared her penchant for off-colour jokes, and ‘They got on like a house on fire,’ as Countess Spencer recalled.